Audience engagement can play a large role in keeping visitors on your site for longer periods of time, inviting them to explore related posts or converting them into loyal fans.

On the other hand, there are people who won’t want to create an account on your site just to leave a comment. When this is the case, engagement is limited and it can stifle your community growth, as this group of users might not return to your site again.

Adding social commenting with Jetpack opens the door for more interactions by making it extra convenient for visitors to comment on your posts using their existing social media accounts. And streamlining this process might encourage previously reluctant visitors to share their thoughts.

Let’s review what social commenting with Jetpack entails, and why you might want to activate this handy feature on your own site.

Website customization is one of the best ways to ensure that your site reflects your brand’s voice, style, and personality. It typically involves incorporating your brand’s colors and fonts, uploading your logo as the header image, adding a background design, and including branded images in your posts.

However, the branding process of site development doesn’t have to stop with the basics. There are a few extra customizations that can get overlooked, even though they’re some of the easiest ways to add an extra touch of personality to your site. One of these customizations is the ability to rename site sections.

Today, we’ll explain why you want to rename your site sections, and the various tools and widgets available to customize the different parts of your website.

Creating a website is a great way to open the channels of communication with your audience members. Visitors can interact with your content, reach out through your social media platforms, and submit forms with their questions and comments. However, even the best website in the world will miss out on growth opportunities if you don’t develop and support these website communication channels.

Great site communication can help you grow a loyal audience, increase brand awareness, and attract more supporters.

There are multiple ways to use your website to increase communication and engagement with your audience. Let’s discuss the importance of nurturing website engagement.

Continue reading → How to Increase Engagement by Communicating with Visitors

Since the advent of the smartphone, it’s rare to find a website that isn’t optimized for use on mobile devices. Managing your website via your phone or tablet, however, is still a fairly new concept.

Managing your site from a mobile device makes running a business more convenient. It’s beneficial for photographers who want to upload photos from their smartphones, bloggers who are inspired by their surroundings on-the-go, ecommerce sellers who want to keep tabs on their site stats, and any other type of website owner.

Let’s take a look at a few ways you can manage your WordPress site from your mobile device, and some tips for getting the most out of your mobile experience with Jetpack.

How well do you think you know Jetpack? Most people know about Stats, Publicize, and Sharing. You may even have your own personal favorite module like Tiled Galleries or Subscriptions. But what about the rest of Jetpack? Here are five things you might not know you can do:

Jetpack comes with a set of features specifically designed to help you increase your site’s traffic and grow your audience. That is after all the reason we build websites and blogs and write content – for people to see them, read them and enjoy them 🙂

Jetpack helps you tackle this along two fronts: attracting new visitors to our sites and encouraging the existing ones to keep coming back.

Getting more traffic

Its worth mentioning what countless people have said before: writing well-written, useful and targeted content is eighty percent of the job. Neither Jetpack, nor any other plugin, is a silver bullet that can ever be a substitute for that. However, if you’ve got that nailed, these features will help you with the other twenty percent:

PublicizePublicize simply automates what you probably do already: posting your articles directly to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a few more social networks. Once you set this up (about 5 minutes usually) you can sit back and not worry about this and focus on writing great content while your friends and followers read what you’ve just posted.

Sharing
The Sharing feature, when enabled, places share buttons at the bottom of your blog posts. This allows (and encourages!) your readers to share your content with their own networks giving you broader reach. Currently we supprt Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Print, and Email. Additionally you can define your own custom services.

Site Verification
Verifying your website with external services like Google, Bing and Pinterest. This means you will be rated as “safe” by these services (e.g. by getting a “Verified” badge) and gives you to access advanced features (e.g. Webmaster tools).

Enhanced Distribution
At WordPress.com we have a service called “Firehose” which is a stream of the public data (public posts, comments, etc.) that flow through WordPress.com as well as Jetpack blogs that enable Enhanced Distribution. The firehose in turn is used by companies and people to display your content at which point they are required to link back to your blog. This means that you get both traffic back to your site as well as building up quality back-links.

Google+ ProfileLastly, when you activate and connect this feature you connect your blog and with your Google+ accounts. Now, displayed below your posts, will be a link back to your Google+ profile, a Google+ follow button and a link will also be added to your Google+ profile allowing Google+ users to find you more easily.

Keep them coming back

The other side of the coin is staying in touch with the visitors who’ve seen and read your content so that they don’t forget about you and come back to see what else you have to say. You may not necessarily want to use all of these of course as it depends a lot on the kind of site or blog you’re running. But because Jetpack makes it easy to turn these on and off some of our users opt to try things one at a time to test out their effect.

Jetpack CommentsComments are a great way of enabling your visitors to join the conversation. It can be a pain for them however to have to creat a new account if its their first time visiting your site. Jetpack Comments enables your visitors to use their existing WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook accounts when commenting on your site making it more likely they’ll do so.

RSS Widget
RSS is used by millions of people to keep track of blogs they like. When you enable Extra Sidebar Widgets in Jetpack you can show widget that allows you to add links to your blog’s RSS feeds in your sidebar. This makes it easy for your readers to stay updated when you post new content or receive new comments.

LikesLikes allow your readers to show their appreciation for your posts and other published content. They will then be able to review their liked posts from their WordPress.com Reader which will remind them your blog exists and encourage them to come back.

Subscriptions
Easily allow any visitor to subscribe to all of your posts via email through a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Every time you publish a new post, WordPress.com will send a notification to all your subscribers. Depending on their preferences this notification will either show up on their WordPress bar (top right) or they will receive an email directly in their inbox.

Notifications

Example of a comment Push Notification from the WordPress for iOS app

Finally, this last one is for you, the site owner. With Notifications enabled you will be instantly notified when somebody comments on any of your posts or previous comments. This means that you can instantly comment back making your interaction with your readers feel more personal and in real-time.